Monday, June 21, 2010

Making a Fool of Yourself

There are many ways of making a fool of yourself. I know, because I've successfully attempted every one of them over the past few decades. I've even repeated some of the easier ones. Several Dozens of times.

Michael Shermer reminds us how easy it is by quoting a physicist. [When Scientists Sin: Fraud, deception and lies in research reveal how science is (mostly) self-correcting]

In his 1974 commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology, Nobel laureate physicist Richard P. Feynman articulated the foundation of scientific integrity: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.... After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”

This reminds me of an even earlier quotation from Peter Medawar in 1961. It's from a review of The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

It is a book widely held to be of the utmost profundity and significance; it created something like a sensation upon its publication in France, and some reviewers hearabouts called it the Book of the Year—one, the Book of the Century. Yet the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.

It's much easier to fool yourself these days, in part because Peter Medawar and Richard Feynman aren't around to keep us honest.

That's one of the problems with modern science.

It's worth noting that Medawar was an atheist and he had little use for those who attempt to bolster religious beliefs with scientific arguments. It's also worth noting that forty years after Medawar's review you can still find people defending Teilhard as in Prophets without honour?, an essay published in Nature in 2000.

Teilhard's books were published posthumously: his religious superiors forbade him publishing his views on human evolution in his lifetime. He thus shared with Galileo the distinction, if that is the right word, of having his work suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church. Just because Galileo was right does not, of course, give everyone else whose work is proscribed the stamp of scientific rectitude, but Teilhard was doubly distinguished in his second martyrdom at the hands of scientific orthodoxy. But apart from its religious streak, Teilhard's approach is not so different from that of the modern field of evolutionary psychology, and he anticipated the explosive growth of mass communication. For a book written in the late 1930s, The Phenomenon of Man seems remarkably prescient.

Teilhard is not alone in being tried by the scientific establishment while experiencing popular success. A good deal of hostility has been directed at the concept of the biosphere as an intelligent organism — James Lovelock's Gaia — and at astronomer Fred Hoyle's ideas on the extraterrestrial origin of life. Both met with popular enthusiasm before the scientific establishment would admit that they were candidate hypotheses. The evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith castigated Hoyle recently in this very journal ( Nature 403, 594–595; 2000).

Teilhard's books must have far outsold Medawar's Reith Lectures, and therein lies a dilemma for scientists in their relationship with the public. Should they, like Medawar, stick to the facts, satisfying the dictates of scientific conscience but, with a limited horizon, reaching a limited audience? Or should they throw caution to the winds as Teilhard did, appeal to a large audience, but risk disapprobation by the scientific community? There is a psychological issue, too, which is that the public may have twigged that not only do orthodox scientists restrict their enquiries to the physical world, but also that many of them believe in their hearts that there is nothing beyond it.

Speaking of phenomena, how often do you sees someone's work compared to evolutionary psychology where the comparison is meant to be a compliment?

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

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The Sandwalk is the path behind the home of Charles Darwin where he used to walk every day, thinking about science. You can see the path in the woods in the upper left-hand corner of this image.

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Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.